Wicked: Part One (2024) – Green With Envy

Released: 1st August
Seen: 24th November

On October 30th 2003, the Gershwin Theatre presented the opening night performance of a little musical about a woman with green skin battling adversity and learning her true power through friendship with a hyperactive floating Barbie… that show was Wicked and to this day that show has captured audiences around the world. As of writing this sentence, it’s the second highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time, the fourth longest-running show in Broadway history and has been toured around the world so many times that it would be impossible to calculate just how many people have seen the show. It is a genre-defining artwork, one that has been talked about being turned into a movie since approximately 47 seconds after a movie producer heard Idina Menzel sing Defying Gravity for the first time and knew that this show needed to be captured on film… it’s taken them 20 years, it’s not the cast that they expected to get and it’s split a 2-hour-long stage show into two movies of 2+ hours each, but it looks like they absolutely nailed it.

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Smile 2 (2024) – What’s The Use of Crying?

Released: 25th July
Seen: 9th November

So… how was your week?

For people who might stumble upon this in the future, this review is being written in the direct aftermath of America looking at a female prosecutor and a convicted felon who a court has determined to be a literal rapist who also has people who study the rise of Adolf Hitler going “Hey, this guy feels familiar” and decided to give the fascist the practically endless power of the United States presidency so I’ve been a little depressed lately (and I’m not even from the US so god knows how I’d feel if I had to live in the same country that did that). It’s been a hard week full of intense emotions with a lot of people just feeling like the world is crumbling around them… seems like a perfect time to go watch the sequel to a movie about how mental illness can drive you to the brink of suicide and beyond, because it seemed like a more fitting option than that cute looking movie about round robots who raise ducks.

Content warning, this film deals heavily with ideas of suicide and mental illness and those will need to be discussed in order to properly discuss this movie. If that is too much for you… this movie will be too much for you, there’s your review. If even reading this far has stirred up emotions, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14, or the service in your country.

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